American woman death row inmate Christa Pike, who survived a failed execution attempt last week, has regained consciousness and is talking.
According to the lawyers of 50-year-old Christa, she is still in the intensive care unit and is being kept shackled in handcuffs and leg irons to the hospital bed. Christa Pike was sentenced to death in 1995 for brutally murdering a woman named Colleen Slemmer along with her boyfriend. Last Wednesday, September 30, two attempts to execute her by lethal injection failed.
Later, she was shifted to the hospital, where medical staff flushed the toxic chemicals injected into her body. She remained unconscious for several days, and experts and her legal team say that her apparent recovery despite being given two doses of lethal injection is an extraordinary event. It is believed that Christa Pike is the only human to have survived an execution by lethal injection. According to her lawyers, her long-term medical condition is still unclear; however, at least it is expected that she will need a long time for full recovery. According to criminologist and professor Deborah Denno, associated with Fordham Law School, she is “extremely surprised” that Pike is not only conscious but also talking.
Denno told the BBC that there have been seven previous incidents in which prisoners survived execution attempts, however in all those cases, prison staff had failed to successfully inject the lethal substance into the prisoners’ veins.
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